US Startup Aims to Liberate Social Media Using Blockchain Technology
Contributed to The Liberty Beacon Project
Social media is full of corruption everywhere you look. The huge tech companies that manage social media outlets are a ubiquitous part of life – privacy, security, and fake news – it seems that there are problems stemming from these massive corporations at every turn. User feeds are full of fake news, their content is being stolen for profit, and privacy is a myth. One company, onG.social, is harnessing the power of blockchain technology to solve these problems.
onG.social and the Blockchain
onG.social is the brainchild of the team at OneName Global, Inc., and particularly of it’s founder, Christopher Kramer. He saw the problems that were inherent in these systems, and sought to systematically correct them through the technological power of blockchain technology. Christopher conceived of the system in 2012, and began the process of disrupting the traditional social media platforms.
Blockchain technology provides a unique solution for social media. The distributed ledger system (essentially a database on a network that is accessible at all times to all users) provides a means of removing the centralized hub corporation, meaning that both the control of information (censorship) and the distribution of profits (earnings) are left in the hands of the users themselves.
Stopping the Censors
One of the biggest issues facing social media today is privacy and censorship. Social media users want to be able to say what they want to the public, and keep things private that they say privately. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms have had massive issues with both of these areas. Because the centralized corporation manages the content of the network, they have arbitrary discretion to either block your public information or disclose your private information.
onG.social is radically changing this model via blockchain. Because the blockchain platform puts the information into the hands of the users, privacy and security are in the hands of the user as well. The distributed aspect provides a system where your information is held by you alone, and the information cannot be accessed by any unauthorized user. Blockchain technology means that any attempt to access your information would be immediately visible to the entire chain, sparking a massive security alert.
Ending Fake News
The production and distribution of fake news on social media has reached a fever pitch. It’s not uncommon for a user’s feed to be half fake news, spread on the internet by bots and political pundits. If a user wants to check out a link, however, most platforms leave a trail on the feed showing that they’ve either ‘liked’ or accessed that article. If you’re a Trump supporter, and you’ve just read a Bernie Sanders article, you might not want that known, and vice versa! But traditional platforms have no way of allowing users to control what news is real or fake, and instead simply allow its proliferation with almost no recourse.
The blockchain platform that onG.social has created solves this issue by providing a way of either rewarding community verified truth, or downgrading unverified information. As a piece of information is verified as true and has global impact, onG’s ‘Gravity’ platform provides token compensation for that information. The method for compensation is the onG Coin, the token being used within the onG.social ecosystem. Users earn onG coins by providing verified news to the community.
Keeping Your Cash
The power of social media to generate wealth is obvious. Some of the biggest tech giants in the marketplace are social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and the like. These companies effectively use the information and content provided by their users to increase their network and make profits. Rather than the actual content creators profiting from their creations, the centralized hub earns the money, and the creator gets some ‘likes’.
Blockchain radically changes this model. The distributed nature of the content means that each user owns their content, manages it, and profits from it based on the community involvement with the content. onG.social allows users to create a social dashboard that bridges to all existing social media content on centralized platforms and then connect with other users with that information. All this information will be protected on the blockchain platform and will be managed directly by the user.
How You Can Join
onG.social is currently conducting an ICO (initial coin offering – think digital crowd-funding) by selling its onG tokens. Many ICOs are seeking funding to produce a first use case of a well-conceived idea. The advantage of onG.social is that the platform is already being used widely, and therefore the tokens already have intrinsic value within the functioning platform. The ICO has already begun and will conclude on September 11. Users who invest in the ICO will receive onG tokens for Ether.
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